I was in Marysville for perhaps the third or fourth time, having just digested a thickly mayonnaised sandwich at the diner, when the phone call came.

I had wandered behind the Taoist temple and up the path that led to a view of the Yuba. It was ugly: trampled sand and shit-colored rocks. Unfinished, graffiti-splattered concrete walls rose up on either side. I was standing there, looking out at the land beyond the river, the land now half-dead with drought, the land that belonged mostly to history, when my phone began to buzz. Perhaps it was my state—suspended as I was between eras and realities—that made me answer the unfamiliar South Bay number.

“Neeraj fucking Narayan,” came the voice. “It’s been a minute.”

Below, a hunched figure emerged from a fluttering blue tarp. He began to rustle in a shopping cart stocked with miscellany—tin cans, ripped shirts, a single in-line skate, a deflating basketball—before lifting a few objects to the sky, as if to inspect them in the dwindling daylight.

“Sorry? Who’s this?”

“It’s me, dummy.”

Who? “Who?”

“Anita!”

“Anita?”

I felt one of my old selves tap me on the shoulder and take up residence in me once more. My ears rang and my eyes filled with something briny—not tears, no. Something else was happening because of the presence of an old creature, a creature to which I was a little allergic.

“Yeah, her, me.”

“Anita? How’d you get my number?”

“Uh, I kept it. I got a new one in college. Okay. Maybe I should have started differently. How’s this? Hi. Hello, again.”

“I, er—I saw your mom the other day.”

“I heard.”

“And Prachi saw you—it’s like—” I almost said It’s like I conjured you. “Small world.”

“It’s always been a little claustrophobic to be an ABCD,” Anita said. “No exit.”

The tarp’s resident—and I—watched a yellow windbreaker try to make its way downriver. It caught on a rock and flapped, an accidental flag.

“Prachi looked right through me,” Anita continued. “She never did like me.”

“That’s not true.” The man was removing his shoes and wading into the river to unhook the windbreaker. Freed, it was soon carried out of view. “I hear you’re not getting married.”

She laughed. “If there’s an extreme opposite of getting married, I’m that.”

My chest untightened, as it had when Anjali Auntie had denied it; there was something about hearing Anita’s own coarse dismissal of the possibility. It confirmed that she had not chosen the life that could have by now subsumed her—Prachi’s life, the life of a future-oriented South Asian professional.

“I think that’s just called being single.”